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5 Time-Saving Instagram Tools to Grow your Business

According to statistics, Instagram is now the King of Engagement amongst Social Media platforms including Facebook and Twitter. Also with over 300 million users and rapidly growing (Instagram jumped in growth by 50% within a 9-month period in 2014), Instagram marketing has become a major avenue for Business owners to grow their audience and business with simple strategies such as those outlined in my article, 10 Ways to Grow Your Instagram Followers.

Alongside all these major advantages of Instagram as a social media marketing platform, being mostly a mobile app (a desktop version of Instagram is available but you cannot carry out all the actions the mobile app allows) and a newish platform, a few issues have arisen, such as the inability to schedule posts to Instagram for the future and the management of multiple Instagram accounts – such as your personal and business accounts or even client accounts.

Well, the good news is that Instagram is not so new anymore and there are now a number of tools and apps – both mobile and desktop to help Business owners using Instagram for Business overcome these issues.

One of the secrets to getting more engagement on your Instagram photos is to post when your target audience are online. But what happens if your optimal time of posting is Tuesdays at 4pm when you are in a weekly meeting, at the gym, a conference or just need to be doing something else at that time? The usual answer would be to schedule the post but this has been a challenge with Instagram Marketing in the past but with the introduction of some great Instagram management tools, this is no longer the case.

Here are a few tools that will save you time with your Instagram marketing, that is, scheduling your Instagram Posts, Managing multiple Instagram accounts and even monitoring the results of your Instagram marketing activities:

Onlypult is a service for posting scheduled Instagram updates. You can upload the images from your desktop, apply filters from the web, manage multiple Instagram accounts and even give other individuals (members of your team) posting rights to your account without giving them access to your brand’s Instagram account.

Onlypult also has a planner where you can plan your Instagram posting times for weeks ahead and keep adding the photos as you go along.

This tool also provides Analytics for your Instagram account in terms of Audience, Engagement and Optimization. Audience analytics will show you the growth of your account over a selected period of time, as well as your account’s average growth; Engagement will show you the amount of likes and comments you are getting over a period of time as well as the performance of specific posts and Optimization will show you the best times for you to post, that is, when your audience are most active on Instagram!

Onlypult will also give you statistics on which of your hashtags are doing well so you can make a decision on the right hashtags to use.

Indeed, this tool is a very useful and robust one – helping you schedule posts, delegate social media posts and providing useful analytics!

The Onlypult service is a paid one with the lowest package starting at $12 per month and the highest being $39 per month.

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that has been around for a while but has recently added Instagram to the robust service it provides.

You can now schedule your Instagram posts with Hootsuite but the tool does not actually post for you. When it’s time for your scheduled post, you will receive a push notification to your phone to click on for the post to actually get published on Instagram. While Hootsuite’s scheduling method may not be as seamless as Onlypult’s, it allows for planning your posts in advance.

You can also monitor your brand, your competitors and keywords, as well as delegate your social media management activities to team members within the tool.

The great thing about Hootsuite is that you can do most of your social media management within this one tool, that is, post to and monitor your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts all in one place!

Hootsuite has a free plan, a Pro plan at $7.19 per month and an Enterprise Plan with pricing available on request.

In May 2015, Agora pulse added Instagram management tools to the suite of services they already provide for other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

The Agora Pulse Instagram management tool provides an Inbox that makes available to you to review all activities from your Instagram account such as comments and messages. You can then tag these activities with a keyword, flag, reply to, or delete them. Basically, the role of this Inbox is for you to never miss a thing or activity that has taken place on your Instagram account!

This feature is very much of benefit especially if you get a lot of notifications on your Instagram account as Instagram currently only allows your most recent 80 notifications in your notification tab. You can still view likes and comments by clicking on the specific picture but there is a major chance that you will miss a comment if it’s not in your notifications.

You can also manage multiple Instagram accounts with Agora Pulse without having to log out and log back in every time, monitor your hashtags so you know the best ones to use, tag important users in your posts (based on how they are engaging with your brand on Instagram – the tool will even assign them badges such as Ambassadors, Influencers and engaged users!) and also provide you with important audience and engagement statistics and reports showing top users, top media/posts and more!

Pricing starts at €29 for micro businesses to €199 for large organisations.

Schedugram like the other tools saves you time by letting you upload images to post later to your Instagram accounts. Unlike some of the other Instagram Management tools mentioned, Schedugram completes the whole process, that is, you don’t have to wait for a push notification and click-through at the scheduled time before your photo is published to Instagram.

With Schedugram, you can also crop, rotate, add text, and filters to your images, do bulk uploads, manage multiple Instagram accounts and have multiple users of one Schedugram account, that is, other team members can also work within the account and tool.

Pricing starts at just $20 per month with increments based on your number of Instagram followers.

Latergramme allows you to upload pictures from your computer, iPhone or android devices to schedule as Instagram posts. You can also manage multiple Instagram accounts, add team members and find and share (repost other people’s content while giving them credit for their work) content on Instagram with this tool.

It is important to note that Latergramme, just like a few other Instagram management tools, does not publish the post to Instagram for you but you get a push notification to click-through in order for your post to be published to Instagram.

There is a free version of this tool where you can manage up to 2 Instagram accounts and schedule up to 30 posts per month. The paid options range from $19 per month to $49 per month.

So there you have them, 5 tools that will save you time with growing your Business with Instagram. I am aware that there are a few more tools out there that might not have been mentioned, so what about you? Which tool or tools are you using to save time with Instagram? Share with us below.

About the Author

Tobi Awoyemi

Tobi Awoyemi is the creator of the Online Instagram Business Growth Course, InstaBizGrowth.
Tobi is an Instagram Specialist & Social Media Strategist and helps Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners brand their business online, attract quality clients and generate more sales using Social Media.